An Introduction to Psychiatry for Probation Officers

the man who commits a crime knowing that what he is doing is wrong but nevertheless takes a chance that he will get away with it. From here we passed on to consider the limitations of the help that the psychiatrist and the mental health services can give, realising that to ask for a psychiatric report can never solve the probation officers problem as if by waving a magic wand. Indeed it may raise further problems. The members then went on to consider that even if a patient is found to be suffering from a mental illness which led to his misdemeanour it does not necessarily follow that the illness was curable. A special warning was sounded against "fussy psychiatry" where it was realised that at times nothing would be gained by sending or committing a patient to hospital simply because the presence of incurable mental illness had been diagnosed; and also provided that the crime with which the patient was charged was of a relatively minor nature and that his illness was not of